Elaria pulled her cloak tight and stepped past the last fencepost of the village. The wind bit at her cheeks, but her blood did not flinch. Somewhere beyond the white hills waited the glacier, and inside it, the warmth crystal her dying kingdom needed. She had only rumors to guide her. Whispers from old men. Half-drawn maps on tavern napkins. It was not enough, and she knew it. Still, she walked. The cost of staying was already counted in the frozen fields behind her. She turned back once, toward the small pub at the village edge. Its windows glowed orange. Inside, she had bought cups of cocoa for any traveler who would speak. Most lied. A few traded scraps of truth for warmth. She had stitched their words together like a torn shirt, but the seams did not hold. From her satchel she drew the folded map. It had belonged to the man who came back wrong. He had left it on his windowsill before he died. The runes along its edges shifted when she breathed on the parchment. She traced a faded line northward, past markings no living tongue could read. She walked until the snow swallowed the path. There, jutting from the drift, stood a tall stone marker carved with symbols and a single open eye. Beyond it, the map showed nothing. No line. No rune. Only blank, yellowed paper. Elaria lowered the map. The rumors ended here. Whatever lay ahead, she would have to find alone.

Elaria stood beside the carved stone and felt the wind shift. The open eye stared past her, toward a horizon that gave nothing back. She folded the blank map and tucked it away. No more lines to follow. No more borrowed words. The cold pressed harder now, testing her. She took one slow breath, then another, and waited for the land itself to show her a sign. Her boot struck something soft beneath the snow. She knelt and brushed the powder away. A bundle of frayed cloth lay there, faded reds and blues stiff with frost. Scarves. Gloves. Pieces of cloaks worn by those who had walked past this stone and never walked back. She set them aside gently and drew a small device from her satchel — a round instrument of tuned rings she had carried since the village. She turned its dial and listened. A thin hum answered, pulling north and slightly west. The rings spun toward a cold she could feel in her teeth. As she rose, a soft step crunched behind her. A pale fawn stood at the edge of the drift, antlers branched like frost on glass. It watched her, unafraid, then turned and took three slow steps in the same direction her instrument pointed. Elaria followed. The hum guided her ears. The fawn guided her eyes. Together they cut a path the map could not draw, and the stone marker fell away behind her, swallowed by white. She had her bearing now. The glacier waited ahead.

The fawn slowed near a break in the snow and stopped. Elaria stepped past it and saw why. The ground split open in a wide crevasse, blue ice falling away into dark. The far side waited just out of reach. Wind cut through her coat. The sun was sliding low. She knelt at the edge and looked for anything that might carry her across. The fawn moved past her and stood beside a low shelf of snow. Elaria brushed the powder away and found a thin arch of ice curving over the gap. It was narrow, glassy, and older than her doubts. She pressed her palm flat to its surface. The ice did not bite her. It welcomed the chill in her blood. She rose, set one boot on the span, and walked. Each step held. She reached the far side as the sun touched the ridge. Behind her, the fawn was gone. Ahead, the slope climbed white and silent toward the glacier.

Elaria climbed the last slope and the glacier rose in front of her. The wall was blue and sheer, marked with sharp ridges and dark cracks. There was no door. There was no seam. The wind cut harder here, and the cold pressed into her coat. She knew she could not stand here long, even with ice in her blood. She walked the base and found a weathered bronze marker set into the snow. Its peak pointed up at the wall like a finger. This was the place, then. The line where the glacier swallowed people whole. She set her pack down beside it and pulled out the axe she had carried since the village. The axe was wrapped in a cold, blue light. Its blade hummed when she lifted it. She set her feet, swung once, and struck the wall. A bright crack ran up the ice. She swung again. Chips flew. The glacier groaned like something waking. On the third swing, the wall split. A narrow opening yawned in front of her, dark and tall and breathing out colder air than the wind outside. She lowered the axe. Her arms shook. The cold inside the gap was not normal cold. It pulled at her, tasting her. Elaria slung the axe across her back and stepped through. The opening closed behind her with a soft, wet sound. She stood in the dark of the glacier now. There was no way back the way she came.

Elaria moved deeper into the blue dark. The tunnel opened into a wide chamber, and at its center stood a tall pillar of ice veined with glowing blue light. Two tunnels split off behind it. Both breathed cold air at her face. Both looked the same. She set her hand on the pillar and tried to listen. Nothing told her which way to go. Then she saw it tucked against the far wall: a small stone outpost, half buried in frost, its roof crusted with old surveying tools. Someone had built this here, long ago, for exactly this choice. Inside, leaning by the door, was a flat stone marker. Its smooth face was empty. Elaria carried the marker to the mouth of the left tunnel and held it up. Frost crawled across the stone in thin, broken lines. She moved it to the right tunnel. The frost spread the same way. Both patterns showed open sky. Both tunnels led outside. Her chest tightened. The marker could not choose for her. A soft step sounded behind her. The pale fawn stood between the two openings, its breath quiet in the cold. It had crossed the sealed wall somehow, or had never been only a fawn at all. It turned its head toward the right tunnel and waited. Elaria lowered the marker, gripped her axe, and followed it in.

The right tunnel climbed for a long time before it spilled Elaria out onto a high ice shelf. Wind hit her face. Below her stretched a valley she did not know, split into three pale basins that all looked the same. The fawn was gone. Without a landmark, she would walk into the wrong basin and lose the crystal's trail. She forced herself to look, not panic. Near the tunnel mouth stood a weathered wooden plaque bolted into the ice, its face carved with old coordinates and faint route lines. Beside it, half frosted over, a tall iron vane turned on a stiff pin. Its arrow was shaped like a thin bird's beak, and its tip pointed steady against the wind, refusing to drift. Elaria brushed the rime from the plaque and matched its marked bearing to the direction the vane insisted on. The arrow held toward the middle basin, where a thin blue thread of light pulsed under the snow. She fixed the line in her mind and started down the shelf. The valley was no longer all the same. She had a bearing now, and a place to aim.

Elaria worked down the shelf with the vane's bearing locked in her head. The numbers on the plaque still meant nothing alone. She needed something to read them against, or she was just walking on faith into white. A flicker of color cut across the snow below. A small winged figure hovered, no taller than her hand, wings catching light like wet petals. The fairy did not speak plainly. She sang half-sentences about finding Lia before it was too late, about ruins that pointed the way. Then she darted ahead, circling a wide ring of black stones laid flat in the snow. Elaria reached the ring and stopped. It was a great compass built into the valley floor, each stone a marked heading, a star carved at its center. She knelt and matched the plaque's coordinates to the stones. The numbers snapped into place. One spoke of the ring pointed straight at a small stone house tucked against the basin wall, smoke curling from its chimney, runes glowing on its walls that mirrored the vane's old marks. She walked to the door. The fairy waited on the lintel. Elaria had her translation now — the bearing, the ring, and the shelter all agreed. She was no longer wandering blind. She was being pointed at a door, and whatever waited inside was the next thing standing between her and the crystal.

Elaria did not knock. The runed door was warm under her palm, but the fairy shook her head and pointed past the house, toward a low ridge of broken stone half-buried in snow. Ruins. The song had said ruins. She turned from the door and walked. The stones were old walls, fallen to knee height. Among them lay a small bundle wrapped in rotted cloth. Elaria knelt and pulled it open. A cracked leather journal slid out, its cover marked with a girl's painted face on one side and a storm of ice on the other. She thumbed the brittle pages. A name repeated in faded ink. Lia. A child born with frost in her veins, left here by frightened villagers, grown into something the glacier remembered. Elaria's hands went still. She knew that shape of life. She spoke the name aloud, careful and clear. "Lia." The air thinned. A small sprite uncurled from the snow between two stones, pale blue and translucent, wings like frozen petals. She studied Elaria without fear, as if she had been waiting a long time to be called. Behind her, deeper in the ruins, a sealed archway shed its crust of ice and cracked open. The key had a face now. The door to the next stretch of the path was open, and Lia was watching to see what Elaria would do with her.

The archway stood open, but Elaria did not step through. The sprite hovered a hand's width from her shoulder, and even at that distance Elaria felt the wrong kind of cold sliding off her skin — a cold that bit through her own ice-blooded calm. The ruins beyond the arch were a broken field of fallen walls, ice-slick stones, and gaps where the snow hid drops. A grown woman would struggle alone. A creature the size of a sparrow, with wings like glass, would not last an hour. "You can't fly that far," Elaria said. The sprite tilted her head. "And I can't carry you. Your skin burns mine. Mine burns yours." She held up her bare hand. A thin frost was already crawling across the sprite's wingtip from the nearness of it. The sprite pulled back. So. Two problems, one shape. Elaria knelt in the snow and opened her pack. She took out the journal first and set it on a flat stone. Inside the back cover she had folded a sheet of notes — her own routes, her own measures of the cold. She tore a clean page and sketched the ruins ahead as best she could remember from the ridge: three collapsed halls, a sunken courtyard, a second arch at the far end. A maze. She marked the gaps she could not see around with question marks and decided she would test each one with the haft of her axe before she trusted her weight to it. Then she packed the journal away and pulled out the cradle. She had built it two nights back from bent willow, wire, and a lining of frostcloth — a small swinging basket meant to hang from a strap across her chest. The frostcloth held cold without passing it. She had not been sure it would work. She set the cradle in the snow and stepped back. "Try it." The sprite drifted down and settled into the lined bowl. She touched the cloth with one finger. Nothing flared. Nothing melted. Elaria pressed her own palm to the outside of the basket and felt only the faintest chill through the weave. She let out a breath she had been holding since the archway opened. She fastened the strap over her shoulder so the cradle hung at her ribs, light as a loaf of bread. The sprite curled inside and watched her face. Elaria lifted her axe, stepped through the arch, and tapped the first stone. It held. She tapped the second. It held. She began to pick her way into the ruins, the small weight at her chest steady, her map in her head, her hands free. The path through was still a maze, and she still did not know what waited at its far end — but for the first time since the glacier sealed behind her, she was not crossing it alone.

Twenty paces past the open arch, the corridor split. Elaria stopped and lifted her axe. Three passages opened in front of her, each lit by a different color of rune cut into the stone — blue on the left, green in the middle, red on the right. The runes pulsed slow, like breathing. She could not read any of them. The cradle at her chest swayed as she leaned in to look closer, and the sprite inside stirred. Something pale lay at the mouth of the green corridor. Elaria stepped closer and crouched. A traveler's pack sat half-buried in old snow, its straps frayed, its tether lines cut clean. She turned it over with the haft of her axe. The canvas was stiff with frost. Inside she found a tin cup, a broken compass, and nothing else. Whoever had set the pack down here had not come back for it. She set the pack against the wall and stood. The green corridor was a dead one. That left two. A tall pillar of layered ice stood at the entrance of the red corridor, its channels catching the rune light and throwing it back in warm streaks. Pretty. She did not trust pretty. She tapped its base with her axe and the sound came back hollow. She stepped back and looked at the blue corridor. Plain stone. No marker. No warning. "I can't read these," she said, low. The sprite climbed to the lip of the cradle and gripped the wire. Elaria held still. The sprite drew a slow breath and exhaled toward the red corridor. A drift of mist left her mouth — pale at first, then bleeding into bands of color, rose and gold and green and blue. The mist drifted into the red corridor and broke against something Elaria could not see. It scattered. It did not come back. The sprite turned her head and breathed again, this time toward the blue corridor. The same rainbow mist slid forward along the wall. It traced the stone in a long, even line and kept going. Where it touched, thin veins of frost spread across a granite slab set into the wall — clean cracks of ice running through the rock in a pattern that held. The mist did not scatter. It pulled her forward like a thread. Elaria lowered her axe. "Blue, then." She set one hand on the cradle's edge, careful of the cloth between them, and stepped into the blue corridor. The rune light washed over her face. Behind her, the red corridor's pillar gave a soft crack as the air in it shifted. She did not look back. The mist drifted ahead at the height of her shoulder, and she followed it deeper into the ruin, the sprite warm-cold against her ribs, the next turn already waiting.

The blue corridor narrowed as Elaria followed the sprite's mist trail deeper. Lia's faint glow brushed the walls on either side, just enough to show smooth stone and the cradle straps at Elaria's chest. The rune light from the entrance faded behind them. Ahead, the passage swallowed the glow whole. Elaria slowed and set one hand on the wall to keep her bearing. Lia rose to the lip of the cradle and pushed her light a few feet further. For one breath, the glow caught a flat slab set into the stone — a chalk map drawn by some earlier traveler, its lines softened under a film of frost. Elaria saw branching paths, small marks where corridors split, and one circled point further in. She tried to fix the shape in her mind. Then Lia's glow guttered, thinned to a pinprick, and went out. The dark closed on them like water. Elaria did not move. She listened. The corridor breathed cold air against her face from somewhere ahead. She could not tell if the floor held a step, a drop, or open space. She reached into her pack with her free hand and pulled out the coil of chain she had taken from the outpost — wide links, cool metal, spaced for a gloved grip. She braced one end against a crack in the wall behind her and fed the chain forward link by link, sweeping the floor ahead of each step. She walked that way for a long time. The chain found two seams in the stone and one narrow gap she stepped over. Lia stayed quiet against her ribs, her glow no stronger than a candle behind cloth. Elaria counted paces under her breath and matched them against the map she had glimpsed. When her count told her the circled point should be near, she stopped and crouched. The floor under her hand was even. The wall to her right opened into a wider chamber she could feel but not see. She set the chain down and reached into the inner pocket of her coat. The orb fit in her palm, smooth and cold. She pressed her thumb to the seam and held it. A pale light woke inside the glass, grew, and spread until it filled the chamber with something close to daylight. The chamber was wide and clean. No drops. No traps sprung. A doorway stood at the far wall, framed in plain stone, and a second chalk mark on the floor pointed through it. Lia lifted her head and stretched her wings in the light. Elaria stood and clipped the orb to her chest strap above the cradle. The merchant who sold it had promised one hour. She had one hour to cross the chamber, read what lay beyond the doorway, and find the next safe wall before the light died again. She picked up the chain, coiled it over her shoulder, and stepped forward into the open room.

Elaria crossed the chamber in steady steps, the orb's light steady on her chest. The doorway at the far wall grew clear as she came near. It was not plain stone after all. A jagged arch of pale crystal stood set into the wall, its edges sharp as broken glass. White chalk lines ran across its face in tight rows of symbols she did not know. Beyond the arch, the corridor split into three dark mouths. She stopped a pace short and read what she could. The marks were a cipher. Without the key, stepping through meant choosing one of three paths she could not undo. She checked the orb. The light had thinned a finger's width inside the glass. Maybe forty minutes left. She set the chain down and walked the chamber's edge, looking for anything the chalk-writer might have left behind. Near the side wall she found it. A block of clear ice sat on a low shelf, its surface scored with hard charcoal strokes. The strokes matched the shapes on the arch. She turned the block in her hands. One face held a column of symbols paired with simple marks she recognized — arrows, a circle, a cross. A key, cut by whoever had marked the door. Elaria carried the block to the arch and crouched. She began to work the cipher line by line. The light was poor for it. Her fingers cramped on the cold ice. She matched a symbol, found its plain mark, wrote it in her head, moved on. She had read four lines when Lia stirred against her chest and pushed out of the cradle. The sprite drifted to the side wall and pressed herself flat against a tall stone column Elaria had not seen in the dim. Frost bloomed where Lia touched. Deep-carved symbols rose under the bloom, the same shapes as the arch. "Stay there," Elaria said. She brought the orb close. The column held the cipher in full, carved deep and clean, with its key cut beside it. The ice block had been a copy. The column was the source. She read fast, lips moving, matching the arch's lines against the carved key. The message was a warning and a count. Left mouth: false floor. Center mouth: long climb, safe. Right mouth: collapse. She read it twice to be sure. Then she stood and faced the arch. The orb dimmed another notch. Elaria fixed the center mouth in her mind, picked up the chain, and lifted Lia back into the cradle. She stepped through the crystal arch into the center passage. Behind her, the chamber light held a few minutes more, then went out. She did not look back. The path ahead climbed in the dark, and she began to count her paces again.

The center passage rose in a narrow shaft of stone, steeper than Elaria had guessed from the arch. She set her hand on the first hold and felt the bite at once. Frost coated every surface, fine and hard, and it stung her palms through to the bone. She climbed two body-lengths before her fingers began to slip. The sprite shifted in the cradle against her chest. Elaria stopped on a thin ledge and pressed her back to the wall to think. She could not climb this. Her bare hands lost grip with each pull. The ice in her blood did not help her here; the frost on the stone was the same cold as her skin, and the stone gave her nothing to hold. If she pushed on, she would fall, and the cradle would crush the sprite beneath her. Elaria lowered herself back to the floor of the arch. She set the sprite down on the smooth lip of stone. The lip was flat but cold enough to harm even Lia in time. Elaria scraped loose snow from a drift at the base of the wall and shaped it with her gloved hands. She mounded the edges and pressed a hollow in the center until it held its form. She lifted the sprite into the snow bowl. Lia settled in and folded her wings. "Wait here," Elaria said. "I will come back down for you." She needed a hold the frost could not strip. She opened her pack and turned out what was left. The chain. A coil of cord. A wrapped shard she had carried since the valley, taken from a vein of clear ice that had shone with strange color in the sun. She unwrapped it now. The shard fit her palm. Its facets caught the dim light and threw back faint bands of red and gold. When she pressed it against the frosted wall, the frost under it melted in a clean ring and did not return. Elaria fixed the shard to her right palm with strips of cord, points outward. She tied the chain to her belt and let it trail. Then she climbed again. The shard bit the stone where her bare hand had slipped. Each grip held. She worked up the shaft hand over hand, planting the shard, pulling, finding a foot ledge, planting again. Her left hand burned on the frost, but her right hand carried her. She counted thirty pulls before her head cleared the top of the shaft and she rolled onto a flat landing of dry stone. She lay still one breath, then drew the chain up after her. She lowered it back down the shaft to the arch below. The sprite climbed onto the bottom link and Elaria pulled, hand over hand, until the cradle was at her chest again. Ahead, a low tunnel ran on into the dark. The shard in her palm was half the size it had been at the bottom.

The low tunnel sloped down for twenty paces and opened into a wider chamber. Elaria stopped at the threshold. A pool of meltwater split the floor from wall to wall, dark and still, deeper than her chain could measure. Steam rose off its surface in thin curls. The far side held dry stone and a low doorway cut into the rock. Lia shifted in the cradle, and a thread of frost crept down the cloth toward Elaria's belt. Elaria knelt and tested the water with the back of her glove. Warm. Warmer than anything she had touched in days. She drew her hand back and watched a film of ice spread from her fingerprint and then thaw again. If she waded in with Lia at her chest, the cradle would freeze the whole pool around her legs. The ice would lock and crack, and Lia would burn against the chill of it. They would not reach the other side. She lifted the orb higher and saw the bridge. It ran from a shelf to her left, arched over the water on thick frozen pylons, and ended at the dry stone beyond. Iron rails lined both edges. The deck looked old but solid. The arch held the walkway a full body-length above the pool. High enough that Lia's cold would not reach the water below. Elaria climbed onto the shelf and stepped onto the bridge. The boards held. She crossed at a steady pace, one hand on the rail, the other braced over the cradle to keep Lia level. The pool steamed beneath her. At the midpoint she felt the rail's iron bite through her glove, and she did not slow. She stepped down onto the dry stone on the far side. Behind her, the pool stayed dark and liquid. The crossing had cost them nothing. A wooden post stood beside the doorway. Two carved arrows pointed off into the dark of the next passage. The lettering was faded but readable: Frest Hills, Dent Hills. Elaria knew both names. She had seen them inked on the chalk map back in the corridor, two of the landmarks circled along the route to the crystal. She pulled the folded copy from her coat and held it under the orb. The signpost named real places on her path. Someone had walked this ground before her and marked it for whoever came next. She turned the cradle so Lia could see the arrows, then started down the tunnel the post pointed toward.

The tunnel beyond the signpost ran level for a long stretch, and the air grew sharper with each step. Elaria pulled her coat tighter and kept one hand braced over the cradle. The cold outside should have helped Lia, but the colder the corridor turned, the harder Elaria's own body worked to keep her warm. She could feel the heat rising off her chest through the cloth. Lia had not spoken in a quarter hour. The small sounds the sprite usually made, the soft clicks and the breath like frost on glass, had stopped. Elaria knelt and set the orb on the stone. She drew the temperature stone from her inner pocket and pressed it against the cradle's lining. The stone's veins should glow bright when cold. They glowed only faint yellow, dim as a banked coal. She opened the cradle flap. Lia lay curled on her side, wings folded, her blue skin paled to milk. The sprite flickered once, like a candle guttering, and her edges blurred against the frostcloth. Elaria felt the heat trapped inside the cradle hit her face. Her own body had cooked the small space while she walked. She worked fast. She pulled the thick wool blanket from her pack, the one she had layered with packed snow between its folds, and shook it open. She fitted it against her chest under the cradle straps, doubling it where her ribs pressed closest. The snow inside the weave crunched as she tightened the buckles. It would slow her heat. It would not stop it. Lia needed something colder to hold. Elaria cupped her bare hands and breathed out. Frost climbed her fingers. She shaped the ice the way her mother had taught her as a child, drawing the cold from her blood into a small figure. She made it the size of her palm: a fairy with folded wings and a long gown, the surface clear and hard. She set the sculpture inside the cradle beside Lia. The sprite's hand twitched. Then her fingers closed around the carved wing. Color returned to her cheeks in a slow flush of blue. The flickering stopped. Elaria pressed the temperature stone to the cradle again. The veins brightened to a steady cold white. She closed the flap and stood. Lia's breath ticked against the cloth, small and even. The blanket bit at Elaria's chest through her shirt, and she could already feel the snow inside it beginning to melt against her skin. She had bought Lia hours, not days. She lifted the orb and walked on, counting in her head how far the next chamber might be before the blanket gave out.

The tunnel widened into a low outdoor pocket where the ruin's roof had fallen in long ago. Snow drifted through the gap, and the walls opened onto a flat crossroads under a pale sky. Elaria stopped at the edge and checked the cradle. Lia's breath still ticked steady against the cloth, and the ice figure inside had not yet thawed. The blanket at her chest was damp now. She had maybe two hours before the snow inside it gave out. Ahead of her stood a stone signpost with four carved arms spread against the wind. Elaria stepped close and read each arm in turn. Backed Camps. Abandoned Camps. Ice Covered. Iced Ruins. Covered Ruins. The names meant nothing to her. She had never heard a traveler speak them. She pulled her folded route map from her coat and spread it against the base of the post. The ink lines ran across tundra she had crossed weeks ago, red trails looping around lakes and ridges she recognized. None of the names on the signpost appeared on the paper. The map ended where the glacier began. She refolded it and pushed it back into her coat. It was useless here. She turned in place and saw the shelter then, set back from the crossroads under a peaked wooden roof. It was small and open-fronted, its central post dark with age. She walked to it and stepped inside out of the wind. The post was covered in carved names, hundreds of them, cut shallow and deep by different hands. Beside many of the names, travelers had scratched short notes. A place name, then an arrow, then a word. Iced Ruins — dead end. Backed Camps — food, three days. Covered Ruins — crystal road, hard climb. Elaria set the orb on the floor and read down the post with her finger. She found the phrase three times. Covered Ruins, and each time the note pointed the same way. One traveler had cut a small open eye beside it, the same mark from the stone at the edge of her old map. She stood a long moment with her finger on the carving. Someone who had walked toward the crystal had left this for whoever came next. She went back to the signpost and stood under the arm marked Covered Ruins. It pointed to a narrow track that ran between two banks of blown snow, downward and out of sight. Elaria checked the cradle again. Lia's breath still came. The blanket at her chest was colder on one side than the other, the snow inside melting unevenly. She lifted the orb and started down the track. The signpost fell behind her, and the shelter with it, and the names of the places she would never visit.

The track dropped between the snowbanks and ended at a wall of white. Elaria stopped and lifted the orb. The Covered Ruins path ran into a slope of packed snow and ice that filled the passage from wall to wall. She could see no doorway, no arrow, no sign of where the road went from here. She set the orb on a flat stone and pulled a small glass timer from her coat. She turned it once and watched the fine snow inside begin to drift down. When the top bulb was empty, Lia's cradle would be dry. Elaria walked the width of the drift and pressed her palm against it in three places. The ice under the snow was solid. She could not dig through in time. She stepped back and looked at the walls on either side. The left wall was blank stone. The right wall showed a corner of something dark under the drift, low to the ground. She knelt and brushed the snow away with her sleeve. A carved pillar stood half-buried against the wall. Ice crusted its edges. The face of it showed a long blue mark shaped like a downward blade, ringed by a border of small looping lines. Elaria wiped more snow from the base. The blade pointed down and to the left. She looked at the drift again. The blade did not point along the corridor. It pointed into the left wall, low, near the floor. She checked the timer. A third of the snow had fallen. She knelt at the base of the left wall and pushed her hand into the drift where the blade aimed. Her fingers met packed snow, then air. She dug with both hands. The snow gave way into a low gap under the wall, wide enough to crawl through. Cold air moved against her face from the other side. Elaria unhooked the cradle from her chest and checked Lia. The ice figure was still whole. The snow blanket at her chest was wet through on one side. She refastened the cradle, tucked it against her ribs, and pushed the orb ahead of her through the gap. Then she went in on her elbows, keeping her body high off the cradle. The tunnel ran three body-lengths and opened. She stood up in a wide hall. The orb's light climbed panes of clear crystal set in slender frames, rising to a peaked roof above her. A pale road of the same crystal ran from her feet into the dark ahead. The crystal road. She pulled the timer from her coat. Half the snow was gone. She lifted the cradle, stepped onto the road, and started to run.

The crystal road ran straight for a hundred paces, then split around a low pillar of pale stone. Elaria stopped at the fork and set the orb down. Two roads of clear crystal branched left and right, each traced with veins of frost that caught the light. The pillar between them was carved with two grooved lines that matched the split. No arrow. No word. She pulled the timer from her coat. A finger's width of snow remained in the top bulb. Elaria crouched and checked the cradle. The ice figure inside was still whole, but the snow at its edges had gone to slush. She had minutes, not an hour. She could not walk one road, find it wrong, and come back. She stood and looked at the pillar again. The warmth crystal gave off heat. That was its whole nature. If she could not read the road, she could read the air. She pulled off a glove and took a shard of clear ice from her pack. She cupped it in her palm and drew a thin thread of cold from her blood into the shard until it hung suspended above her skin, shaped like a small tapered stone. She fixed a length of thin chain to its top and let it swing free from her fingers. The shard turned once, slowed, then tipped. Its point drifted left, steady, and held. Elaria watched it for a count of ten. The pendant did not waver. She lifted the orb and stepped to the mouth of the left road. Warmer air moved against her face. Faint, but real. She looked back at the right road and felt nothing but the flat cold of the hall. She unhooked the cradle strap, tightened it against her ribs, and started down the left branch at a run. The pendant swung ahead of her chest, still pointing the way it had chosen. The road curved. The frost veins in the crystal grew thicker and began to glow faint pink along their edges. The pendant tugged harder on its chain. Elaria checked the timer once more and saw the last of the snow slip through. She did not stop. Somewhere ahead, close enough now that the air itself had changed, the warmth crystal was burning through the dark, and she had chosen the road that led to it.

The crystal road ended at a wall of light. Elaria stopped hard, her boots skidding on the smooth floor. A fence of quartz shards rose from the road to the ceiling, each spike taller than three men and thick as a barrel. The shards glowed from within, pale blue at the base, white at the tips. Warm air pressed through the gaps but no gap was wide enough for a hand, let alone a body. She walked the length of the wall twice. She found no door, no seam, no crack. The road simply stopped, and the wall simply stood. She knelt and checked Lia. The ice figure in the cradle had softened at the shoulders. Water beaded on the frostcloth and dripped between Elaria's fingers. When she stood, she saw what the drip had done to the road behind her. A shallow dip had formed in the crystal where she had been kneeling, its surface slushed and pitted, rimmed with grainy frost. Every step she had taken down the road left a fainter version of the same mark. Lia was melting the road as she failed. Elaria had minutes. Maybe less. She pressed her palms against the quartz and pushed cold from her blood into the wall. Nothing moved. She struck it with the flat of her axe. The blue light on the blade flared and died, and the wall did not chip. She stepped back and forced herself to look at the whole shape of it. At the center, low to the ground, one shard was rounder than the others. She crouched. Set into its face was a disc of dark metal, rings inside rings, notched with small teeth and marked with a single sun at the middle. A puzzle lock. She had walked past it twice because it sat below her knee. Elaria opened the cradle. She lifted the softening figure of Lia in her gloved hands, held her to the disc, and let the sprite's breath fog the metal. The outer ring turned. The next ring turned against it. One by one the rings clicked, matching the frost patterns to the teeth, until the sun at the center sank into the shard with a soft snap. A seam split the quartz from floor to ceiling. The shards drew apart on either side, and warm gold light poured through the gap. Elaria settled Lia back into the cradle. Water ran down her ribs. She stepped through the opening and the wall closed behind her, sealing the road and her only way back in a single silent motion.

The gold light hit Elaria like a wall. She stopped just past the sealed shards and shut her eyes against the glare. The chamber ahead was bright as a forge, walls of jagged ice throwing the light back at itself until every surface burned white. She could not see the floor. She could not see the far end. Somewhere in that furnace of light sat the warmth crystal, and she had brought a melting sprite to find it. Lia sagged in the cradle. Her shoulders had gone soft, her wings drooping against the frostcloth. Elaria dropped to one knee and drew cold from her blood into her palms, shaping a smooth block of ice edged with packed snow. She set the platform down just inside the chamber, where the light was thinnest, and lifted Lia onto it. The sprite's skin firmed against the cold surface. Her breath steadied. "Stay," Elaria said. "I will not be long." She stood and faced the light again. Squinting only turned the glare to knives. She could search this chamber blind for an hour and still miss the crystal by a hand's width, and Lia did not have an hour. Elaria unslung her pack and dug through it. Her fingers found the antler frame. She drew out the amber lens, its glass veiled in a thin skin of dark ice, and held it up. Through the lens the chamber changed. The white glare dulled to a soft honey wash. The walls resolved into ridged ice, blue at the seams. The floor showed itself, tiled with frost. At the far end of the chamber, on a low pedestal she had not been able to see before, sat a faceted stone the size of her fist. It gave off no glow of its own. The chamber's gold light bent around it and poured out from behind, which was why the room burned. The crystal was the source. The lens showed her exactly where. She walked to it. Ten paces. Twenty. Her boots left dark prints on the frost. She kept the lens to her eye and counted the distance, one hand out for balance. When she reached the pedestal she lowered the lens and the light struck her full in the face again, but now she knew where to put her hand. Her glove closed on the stone. It was warm through the leather. She lifted it, and the chamber's glare dimmed at once, as if a lamp had been shuttered. Elaria turned. In the softer light she could see Lia on the ice platform, small and blue and still whole. She could also see what she had not seen before: the walls behind her had no door. The shards had sealed. The chamber held one entrance and one exit, and both were the same, and both were closed. She had the crystal in her hand. She had nowhere to take it.

The dimmed chamber pressed close around her. With the crystal in her glove, the walls had gone from forge-white to a dull blue, and now the blue was fading too. Elaria could still see Lia on the ice platform, but only as a pale shape. In minutes she would not see her at all. She had the crystal. She had no door. She had a sprite whose second death was already climbing toward her through the dark. Elaria set the warmth crystal in her pack and knelt by Lia. The sprite's wings had firmed on the cold block, but her eyes were slow. Elaria pulled the icicle pendant from her collar. It hung from its chain at an odd angle, tip lifted, as it always did near heat. Now it pointed sharp toward the far corner of the chamber, higher than her head. She turned in place. The tip followed one line only. Something up there was drawing warm air. Something up there was open. She crossed the floor with one hand out. Her boot struck stone, then wood. She felt along it and found a low arch built into the wall, its passage packed with snow and blocks of ice, timbers braced across the front. A door. She dug at the snow with both hands. The pack came away in wet clumps. Behind it the ice went on, and behind the ice more ice, and behind that a flat stone wall with no seam. The arch was a shell. Someone had built it to be found first, dug at first, believed in first. She sat back on her heels. Her hands burned with cold. The pendant still pointed past the false door, up and to the left. She followed the pendant's line to the corner and found the vent near the ceiling. A square of rusted grating, slats bent, a fringe of thin icicles along its lip. Warm air moved through it in a slow breath. Elaria could not reach it standing. She went back for Lia. On a shelf near the platform something small glowed steady through the gloom — a smooth stone laced with pale veins, no bigger than an egg, still burning after who knew how many years. A seeker before her had set it down and not come back for it. Elaria took the stone in her free hand and held it up. Its light spread across the wall. The grating showed clear, four screws at its corners, the lowest one already loose. She stacked her pack and the empty cradle frame beneath the vent and lifted Lia onto her shoulder in a fold of frostcloth. She climbed. Her knife turned the screws one by one. The grating dropped and rang on the floor. Cold air poured down over her face, thin and moving, coming from somewhere with sky in it. Elaria pushed the light stone into the shaft ahead of her and hauled herself up after it.

The shaft closed around her shoulders. Elaria pushed the glowing stone ahead with her forearm and dragged herself after it. Lia lay in the frostcloth against her chest, wings slow, breath thin. The metal walls sweated cold. Somewhere behind and below, the second sprite would find the vent soon. Somewhere ahead, the shaft either ended in sky or in stone. She did not know which, and Lia would not last a wrong guess. She stopped at the first bend and worked a hand into her coat. The wayfinder came out warm from her body. Its face lit under the stone's glow — a compass ring, a shaped arrow, small green marks flickering along the edge. Her father's officers had used these on the ridge patrols. Point it along a passage and it read the moving air, then drew the line air took to open ground. The arrow settled. It bent left and up, then held. Open sky, it said. Not a wall. She let out a breath she had been holding since the grating fell. She crawled. The bend came where the arrow promised. Past it, the shaft narrowed. Elaria turned her shoulders sideways and pulled with her elbows. The light stone scraped ahead. On the wall by her face, scratches came into the light — arrows cut deep into the metal, the word EXIT chalked and gouged and chalked again, some hands neat, some frantic. A seeker had come this far and marked it for the next. Elaria set her jaw and moved past the writing. Lia shivered against her ribs. The frostcloth had gone damp at its edge. Elaria pressed the light stone into a seam to free her hand and touched the cradle. Lia's wing folded under her thumb like wet paper. Elaria drew her hand back. She could not stop here. She fixed her eyes on the wayfinder's arrow and pulled harder. The shaft tilted up. Cold air struck her face in a steady push. She could smell snow in it — not the dead cold of the chamber but the living cold above the glacier. The stone's glow found a lip of iron ahead, and past the iron, gray light. Elaria shoved the stone out first. It rolled and stopped against something soft. She dragged herself over the lip and fell forward onto packed snow. She lay under a broken roof. Frost-furred beams leaned in above her, half caved, the drift risen inside the walls to her waist. An old shelter, built over the vent by someone who had known this way out. Wind moved in the gaps. Sky showed through the breaks in the boards, pale and real. Elaria opened the cradle. Lia's light was a thin blue thread. Elaria packed fresh snow around the sprite with shaking fingers, and the thread steadied, and held.